History: The Paintings of Raphael

This course will focus on the paintings of Raphael, his network of friendships and rivalries, and his crucial role in developing and contesting a ‘high’ Renaissance style. We will analyse a number of key works in detail, placing them back into their social and art-historical context, in order to gain a clearer sense of Raphael’s distinctive place in Italian Renaissance art. One particular focus will be on his rivalry with Michelangelo, but we will also consider larger issues of patronage, purpose, and the increasing emphasis on the creation of an individual style as part of the emerging notion of the painted image as a work of ‘art’. We will look at both religious and secular commissions, across a range of media (including drawings, and paintings done on panel and in fresco), with a particular focus on the major paintings done in Rome. The course will be discussion-based, so that individual responses will feed into and balance out the ongoing evaluations of the group as a whole: in this way, we will continuously test out and consider a variety of ways of interpreting how the paintings might have worked, and what they would have meant for viewers, especially in the contexts of their own time.